As manufacturing, processing, shipping, and other industrial processes incorporate radio frequency identification (RFID) technology into their infrastructure, the need for efficient and effective information management schemes becomes preeminent. An RFID tagged item moving from raw materials to assembly to transport to consumer purchase generates a highly distributed yet still inter-related series of associated data along the way. Logistical difficulties arise when one attempts to access information associated with the RFID component-containing item because this information is distributed among all the various physical locations where the item was assembled, processed, shipped, stocked, etc.
By way of illustration and not limitation, when a fully assembled item leaves a factory to be shipped, information on its RFID component can be recorded as it leaves. That information can be stored at a data store physically located at the factory. When the item arrives at a receiving area, the information on its RFID component can be recorded again, with additional information concerning the item's receipt at the receiving area recorded upon the item's receipt, or optionally written to the RFID component at that time. That information can be stored at a data store physically located at the receiving area. Consequently, the information associated with the RFID tagged item exists in two different physical locations (i.e., at the factory and at the receiving area). To obtain an accurate information history for the RFID component-containing item, one must be able to access the information in both physical locations across a database system.
As RFID is pulled deeper into manufacturing operations and utilized at an item level, manufacturers will be faced with an information explosion that includes inter-related, but highly distributed, information related to the production and distribution of a particular product. In particular, compliance requirements will increase, driving up the requirements for manufacturers to efficiently and seamlessly support tracking and tracing of products at a high level of granularity.
To support these requirements the information that can potentially be captured by RFID can include every aspect of how the product was manufactured—such as the bill of materials, supplier identification, recipe, or even machines/tooling/fixtures at each process step and beyond. Although related to each other, this information may also have to reside in several different databases from the automation level (local) to the enterprise level (global) due to legacy systems already in place and to the geographic distribution of facilities that can exist in an enterprise. In order to manage and harness this information explosion beneficially, sophisticated data management methodologies built upon standardized nomenclature, structure and format are needed to represent manufacturing and process information that can be captured to an item level tag.